#23: moments in love
Welcome to issue #23 of THIS NEWSLETTER CANNOT SAVE YOU, the latest in a series of attempts to deliver on the promises that brought this newsletter into your lives. Expeditions are mounted into the vast global logosphere, returning with news of fleeting media wonders and clever online japery. Creative jewels of humanity's twilight years are distilled into tantalizing bullet points for your amusement, before their digital footprints inevitably fade into the twin realms of bit rot and cultural irrelevance. This newsletter is no exception - enjoy this tiny beacon while it lasts. It's Friday in cyberspace, and I'm not fucking around here.
Highlights from Scottoworld
Featured comic: XKCD by Randall Munro, published 8/11/2022, shared under Creative Commons license 2.5. Amal El-Mohtar wrote the New York Times review of BATTLE OF THE LINGUIST MAGES; and co-wrote with Max Gladstone the epic sci-fi romance, THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR.
Scottovision
Once again, a rich menu of video delights awaits you, should you be so courageous as to watch this pile of stuff:
"Bicstan" (2022) - Avant-weird filmmaker Alan Resnick and comedian Patti Harrison tag team to direct the music video for Hudson Mohawke's single from his third album, Cry Sugar, out now on Warp Records. The video depicts a demented game of one-on-one basketball that defies common sports-movie tropes to deliver instead an unexpectedly bizarre and hilarious competition, proving definitively that sometimes dancing is more important than winning.
"Beyond The Invisible" (1996) - This music video by the new age electronic act Enigma caught me by surprise, quickly rocketing into the number two position in my chart of Top Three Music Videos That Prominently Feature Ice Skating. The internet leads me to believe that many if not all of Enigma's videos are inexplicable like this one, but of the four Enigma videos I watched, this is the only one that made a lasting impression, with its obscure made-up symbolism, aliens with inscrutable motives, and the crucial ingredient that pulls it all together: an otherworldly ice skating routine. My appreciation of this video, while deeply ironic, is also terribly real. (For reference, number three is "Dust Clears" by Clean Bandit, and number one is - obviously - "Moments In Love" by Art of Noise.)
"Sunbelly" (2022) - The description says, "SUNBELLY is a sci-fi fantasy film about a group of interplanetary explorers searching for home." I feel it's important to mention that the interplanetary explorers are DOGS. Okay, but also, the animation style is beautiful, the ending is an unexpected psychedelic jolt, and although it's the tiniest bit too ambiguous in places, an emotional connection to the story is earned all the same. Written/directed/animated by Jordan Speer, who animated the excellent Homeshake video, "Vacuum"; featuring a score by Katelyn Aurelia Smith; and co-produced by Encyclopedia Pictura, the production company behind Björk's "Wanderlust" video, Metronomy's "The Upsetter," and Panda Bear's "Boys Latin" (an astounding track record of goodness).
"Jacques in the Box" by Laurent Garnier ft. LBS Crew (2012) - Oh, you'd like to see giant eyeballs hovering menacingly over the land, foretelling surrealist doom for all they survey? Sure, let me hook you up.
"Future Beach" (2018) & "A Guide To Indulgence" (2017) - Filmmaker, photographer, and occasional model Nadia Lee Cohen has a unique eye on the fashion world, whether directing her own short films, music videos for the likes of Kali Uchis ("After The Storm") and Katy Perry (no link), or fashion films for clients like Italian streetware designer GCDS. "Future Beach" is ostensibly one of those fashion films, clocking in at :49 and bringing you a slice of life straight from a barbecue attended by mutants. "A Guide To Indulgence" is a satirical look at beauty and fashion trends, but she's certainly not taking cheap shots; this is a weirder critique than you might expect. Extra credit: "Dinner's Ready" featuring Sophia Loren.
"Culture Catcher" (2022) - Nadia Lee Cohen recently closed an exhibition of her work in Los Angeles, the most popular exhibition in the gallery's history, and a small documentary crew snuck in to review it a couple days before it was gone. Jeff, the host of this film and part-time manager at a local Arby's, has a shall we say unique take on modern art, and his commentary on Cohen's work is priceless.
"Björk shows residential recording studio in Spain" (1998) - A documentary excerpt following musical visionary Björk during the recording sessions for her third album, Homogenic. It's fascinating to watch her artistic process in action, and it's a little thrilling to hear the string octet recording classics like "Hunter" and "Jóga" under her creative direction.
"Björk watches Madonna's 'Bedtime Story' live performance" (1995) - So this one time, Madonna asked Björk to write a song for her, and Björk (not a fan of Madonna) took the gig because it sounded like a challenge. She turned in a song called "Bedtime Story," which was reworked to fit an upcoming Madonna album by trip hop producer Nellee Hooper (one of Massive Attack's early collaborators) and producer/composer Marius de Vries (who would someday be the music director for the film Moulin Rouge), and it became a sleeper hit for Madonna, who then performed a flashy version of it at the Brit Awards, turning in what many considered to be one of the best performances in that show's history. But what, you might ask, was Björk - already a Brit Award-winner herself at that point - thinking as she sat in the audience and watched Madonna perform her song? This footage captures her reactions.
"Ghosts" (2021) - A short abstract film by Vadim Epstein, a media artist and former theoretical physicist who's delivered visuals for hundreds of concerts and festivals over the years. Here's how "Ghosts" was created: "Multidomain image-to-image transforming neural network StarGAN2 has been used here recurrently, reprocessing its own output without additional inputs. The models have been trained on both figurative imagery and abstract art, to enrich and intensify visual & semantic experience." I know, right?? Stick around to the end or you'll miss the faces.
"TEOPEMA (The Theorem)" (2022) - A much more immersive film by Vadim Epstein, this time driven by Illustrip, "a distinct ML-based video synthesis technique," which received prompts from a foundation model called CLIP, "a neural network that efficiently learns visual concepts from natural language supervision." The result: "TEOPEMA absorbs various aspects of the anthropocentric worldview, including those of material, social or spiritual nature, and uses them as a statistical data array to suggest a possible plausible solution to the mathematical problem of a higher order: A Poem." This is a deeply weird and engaging and occasionally eerie view of the entire history of existence, from the dawning of the first galaxies all the way to multiple science fiction futures and beyond.
Commentary track: who needs humans
As I was putting this issue together, I learned about a controversy brewing among visual artists about how artificial intelligence may soon or someday replace them. One platform under scrutiny: "Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image model that will empower billions of people to create stunning art within seconds. It is a breakthrough in speed and quality meaning that it can run on consumer GPUs." The fear is that, just as Amazon plans to someday replace all the humans in its warehouses with robots, so too will corporations turn to software instead of humans when they need custom imagery or design work. Perhaps this fear is also coupled with an air of surprise; it might make sense for manual laborers to be replaced by the efficiency of machines, but certainly artists thought their ingenuity and creative spark would not be so easily replicated.
Part of the concern is broadly existential - creative industries could be gutted as an entire tier of creative work is reduced to sending text prompts to a software agent and getting back a result in thirty seconds instead of several meetings and a dozen billable rounds of comps. Part of the concern is the feeling of being personally robbed - unscrupulous tech bros might someday use AI to sell images in the specific style of actual living artists (an accusation on the table right now); but no one is approaching artists to license their work for inclusion in training datasets in the first place. It would be maddening to develop a signature style as an artist, only to see it lifted wholesale by AI and industrialized past your personal capacity to ever compete. It reminds me of how people started minting and selling NFTs for artwork they didn't actually own, in that the root cause is the shitty behavior of unscrupulous tech bros; but style is more amorphous and subjective - and not as theoretically protectable as an individual piece of art.
Creative culture is built around remixing of elements. It's baked in as a guiding philosophy, acknowledged in supposed truisms like "good artists copy, great artists steal" and "there are no new ideas," implying that we thrive on repurposing existing ideas for new causes more than we can hope to inject something truly novel into history. You couldn't train up as an artist without emulating your idols to the point of almost replicating their styles at least temporarily, it's literally taught as a tactic in universities, and you couldn't implement a DMCA-like model to interrupt any of that. Meanwhile, just as human artists do, the software is certainly capable of producing a lot of bad art, derivative and repetitive, with an unmistakable signature style across the board that is already feeling tired to me. Like, morphing eyeballs as a recurring motif is starting to grate. But I'm also seeing remarkable stuff when artists dig deep using these platforms. Being afraid of this evolution in tools feels on some level like being afraid of the arrival of Photoshop. We should want to make it easier for artists to spend more time on the envisioning and less time on the grunt work of implementation.
Still, I know someday some enterprising asshole might feed my manuscripts into similar software and produce a new book by me that I didn't write. I get it. It's the old "tools can be used for good or evil and the choice is yours" routine, except the choices many people make are constantly, relentlessly, recklessly evil, because profit. And the only suggestion I have to offer is "gee I'd better make sure that I'm the asshole feeding my manuscripts into that software" - it certainly isn't "I'd better write more books and hope they're competitive!" As a thought problem, some writers are already actively discussing how they might someday use software to handle the "boring parts" of writing novels, and that's a mere semantic argument away from letting software write the whole novel.
[paragraph deleted due to generally poor attitude about things]
Eventually, when the capital value of every possible resource has been extracted and the planet's surface is a desolate wasteland devoid of life, human society will be reduced to a few hundred bored billionaires in their bunkers in New Zealand, desperate for novelty and trying to coax bored software into making one more boring sequel to The Matrix, centuries after the last creative laborer passed away into history, heroically refusing to utter any famous last words on the way out because they'd just get stolen by content drones and repurposed into marketing copy for perfume and car ads.
(Don't worry, I do plan to be judicious about writing commentaries in future issues.)
Exit music
I was originally planning to be cheeky and send you out this time with a track from the STUM433 compilation, which collects over 50 recordings of John Cage's composition "4'33" (in which musicians are instructed not to play their instruments for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds) by nearly every one of the artists signed to Mute Records (my favorite is Depeche Mode's version). I also considered the Orbital remix of "Bedtime Story," which adds one more absurd layer of talent to a song that Madonna barely pulled off.
But instead, I thought you might like to see and hear "Sailing Days" by salyu x salyu, a collaboration between the popular Japanese singer Salyu and the offbeat electronic jazz artist Cornelius. It's a song about searching the high seas for someone you love, and the video sets a good example for anyone who winds up in the company of a hundred clones of themselves: you could all make music together.
Here is the YouTube playlist featuring almost all the recommendations from this issue; links to the missing items are provided in the description. If you like this newsletter, consider forwarding it to your favorite influencer or media mogul, and be sure to include several enthusiastic emojis to catch their eye.
Until next time, I remain your friendly correspondent, thinking of you,
Scotto
Scotto Moore is the author of BATTLE OF THE LINGUIST MAGES and YOUR FAVORITE BAND CANNOT SAVE YOU.